


A Lonely Impulse of Delight

by MercuryGray



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Battlefield, Canon Compliant, F/M, Hospitals, Nurses & Nursing, Original Character(s), Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Points of View, Powerlessness, observation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-11 16:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11718150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: Not all hands on Dunkirk beach are fighting - and not all eyes are looking heavenward, either. Another point of view on Dunkirk.





	A Lonely Impulse of Delight

She was used to the sound of engines now.

 

It had been strange, coming aboard the hospital ship, and hearing behind every wall and floor the constant hum. But she had gotten used to it, as she had gotten used to calling walls and floors bulkheads and decks, and bunks that were bolted to the wall, and drinking water that always tasted of chlorine, and coffee that always seemed to smell of oil. Work helped. Work was discipline, and repetition, and routine, and to all those things that she had done a thousand times at a thousand bedsides was added the low undertone that never seemed to stop, until, it, too, was as natural as the air.

 

The engines sounded in different tones, depending on the speed and the maneuver, and now she knew them all, as intimately as she knew the sound of her own heart, or Robin's breathing. Almost as well, she thought, as Robin knew the sound of his Spitfire.

 

She thought about him while she listened to the engines at night, the boyish thrill on his face when he'd brought her to the airfield and the planes had roared overhead in tight formation. "Is one of those yours?" she'd asked, watching him go positively giddy with delight.  "One just like it," he'd explained, taking her into the hangar and showing her around the thing, talking all the while about the elliptical of the wing and propeller inclines and the flexion caused by the guns. 

 

His smile made her think of Yeats.

 

_ No law, nor duty bade me fight,  _

_ Nor public man, nor cheering crowds, _

_ A lonely impulse of delight  _

_ Drove to this tumult in the clouds. _

 

"You needn't be frightened," he'd said, when she'd told him about what she'd seen while he'd been admiring the plane, the parachute that would not deploy and the gas tank that would catch fire and the sidewalls that seemed too thin to bring him back down to land.  _ But I am frightened, _ she'd thought, while he pulled her close in the eave of the propeller and kissed her, as if to prove her wrong.  _ You're only a man - only flesh and bone.  And I've seen what planes and fire and metal do to bodies. How they unmake them _ .

 

But he was deaf to it, and instead of saying more, that night in a small inn she let him unmake her, hot and quick and full of life,  _ please, Robin, yes, Robin, please. _ Before you're gone, while you're still here, while you're still you. While he slept she traced the lines of his chest, her mind somehow jammed on Yeats' verse, like a canopy that would not open.

 

_ I know that I shall meet my fate    _

_ Somewhere among the clouds above;    _

_ Those that I fight I do not hate    _

_ Those that I guard I do not love.  _

 

She'd only had the three day pass, and then she was back on duty, back to long distance phone calls at odd hours and the occasional letter filled with words that were not enough,  _ miss you terribly darling, must see you soon, think of you always _ . The war seemed far away, and she found herself listening for planes. And then they were being ordered out to help with the evacuation. _ Check your supplies, girls, _ the matron had said as they inspected the wards and changed the linens, the decks bright from their latest scrubbing.  _ Who knows what we'll have waiting for us when we get there. _

 

They did not speak in speculations, and underneath their anxiety the engines thrummed belowdecks. "It's a good sound," one of the naval officers had said one night while they stood on deck, cruising down towards the Channel. "It means the ship is still alive. We're still alive."

 

They could scarcely believe the beach. So many men - so many of them wounded! So many dead. "S-s-s-shot like rabbits," one man said angrily as she bandaged up his arm, his teeth chattering as the wound pulsed and her fingers took on the color of his blood. "Where's the b-b-b-bloody airforce?"

 

She didn't have an answer for him, and went to the next casualty, her eye drawn, inexplicably, to the flashes of blood on the deck. And it had been so clean this morning. War was a dirty business. How young they all looked! How tired! All their faces seemed the same, their pain one pain, a sea of bandages and blood that went on and on and did not end, their bodies all alike. 

Bombs dropped. Men screamed. Nurses worked mute. Time fell out of joint. The engines went on.

And then, in the distance there was a building roar, and she looked up. A Rolls Royce Merlin. She knew it now, the sound different than her ship. It was as if he'd reached out and touched her. 

 

Was it his? 

 

Did it matter? 

 

For a scant minute she looked skyward, her thoughts one jumbled trail of  _ PleaseGodPleaseGodPlease _ , the only sound she heard the engine, quickly fading out.  The world hung still around her. She heard Robin's heart under her hand, the Spitfire roaring overhead to take another pass, let loose another burst of gunfire. Then it was gone.

 

Around her the sounds came back - moans, cries for water. Beneath her the ship's engine carried on, low-throated, like a lover - like a heartbeat.  _ We're still alive. _

 

She took a breath and went to work.

**Author's Note:**

> One of Dunkirk’s great strengths, I thought, was that its characters weren’t weighted down by backstory. We didn’t care about them because of any particular virtue - we cared about them because they were young, and they were alone, and they were scared. Plain and simple. I wanted to see if I could translate some of that anonymity into another character, someone watching the battle. Is the narrator’s Robin one of the pilots from the movie? Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t - but hopefully we care about her (and him) on the virtue of her fear. I also wanted to see if I could replicate the soundscape of the movie in written form - the long tense silences, the ticking clock, and those building crescendos in the score that always seem to sound like incoming engines to me.
> 
> Speaking of engines, both the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane, the primary fighter and bomber of the RAF, respectively, used the Rolls Royce Merlin; apparently it sounds different inside each of the two planes. The features that Robin outlines for the narrator are all real features of the Spitfire.
> 
> For anyone interested in learning more about the RAF during the evacuation of Dunkirk and the subsequent Battle of Britain, I recommend Fighter Boys, by Patrick Bishop. (Not having any resources at my disposal about British hospital ships or British nursing in World War Two, I have used some artistic license and a working knowledge of American nursing during the period in the stage business onboard the boat.)
> 
> The poem our narrator quotes is “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” from WB Yeats’ 1919 book “The Wild Swans at Coole.”


End file.
